Monday, June 1, 2015

Illustration: Yin Yang of Earth

This illustration made by Greenpeace, India in collaboration with the
advertising giant McCann Worldgroup portrays the state of our planet
because of human activities.

"Yin Yang is a result of the same kind of belief and
thought process. Everyday natural disasters and environmental hazards
triggered the observation that the state of environment is imbalanced.
Hence the idea – “Bring back the balance” was born. To visually depict
it, I used the popular Chinese symbol “Yin Yang”. The symbol describes
the state of balance between two opposites with a little bit in each. I
wanted to explore this irony that exists between the symbol and the
present state of environment.

It was quite a time consuming campaign. Before starting
off, I invested a lot of time in doing research regarding the factors,
causes and reasons behind different kinds of environmental pollutions.
It was followed by a number of sittings with the illustrators in my team
to finalize the style and scale of detail of the artworks. The rough
sketches were done for more than a month by me and 2 illustrators. The
original illustrations were hand drawn on wall sized sheets. I tried for
as much detail and reality as possible. The illustrations were then
painted with watercolors, photographed and digitalized. The last leg of
the campaign involved the laborious task of retouching. It was pretty
challenging to keep the synergy of earth colors (green and blue) intact
while bringing forth the black and white of Yin Yang in the artwork, at
the same time. It took the team more than 6 months to draw & paint
and 3 months to retouch the whole project keeping in mind every single
object in it. Now, here is the final result in front of you and it seems
now the effort was worth all the time."